As I understand it, Antonio Di Benedetto did not think of his three books — Zama (1956), The Silentiary (1964), and The Suicides (1969), each now available from NYRB Classics in exceptional translations by Esther Allen — as a trilogy, though Zama is dedicated “to the victims of expectations”; that came later, after his death, through critical conversation, and may have been first posited in an essay by Juan Jose Sauer in 1999. Nevertheless, these three novels about the agony of deferment talk to each other in ways that are brilliant, though they do not comfort us in troubled times when work done to advance us to some hoped for, some expected outcome suddenly feels futile.

Which isn’t to say that the three protagonists — misanthropic, selfish men each of them — merit our sympathy, even if they might speak about our troubles. Their thwarted hopes make them unfeeling, potentially even dangerous, to those around them. In Zama, the colonial administrator longs for a better post, which never comes, causing him to act increasingly erratic. In The Silentiary, the noise of the world outside — which often feels maliciously directed at him — prevents an author with a disturbing sense of superiority from working on his book. In The Suicides, our first-person narrator is similarly unlikeable as we watch him contemplate his own frustrations, wondering not whether he should end his own life but whether he should go on living. It’s not necessarily something he had been thinking about, but life has given him some reasons to consider.

My father took his life on a Friday afternoon.

He was thirty-three.

I’ll be thirty-three the last Friday of next month.

Tia Constanza mentioned the coincidence, discreetly but tactlessly. I forgot all about it. Until today, when you might say it came looking for me.

At the same time, in his work as a journalist, he’s been asked to investigate three recent deaths by suicide in order to write a series of articles. And at the same time, he doesn’t really feel like his life is getting anywhere. While he’s in a relationship with a woman named Julia, he is also looking for something else, often commenting on the women who are assigned to work with him. He tries to escape all of this by going to the movies. At any rate, he wants to get away from whatever his daily life is giving him:

I walk for a bit, looking for a restaurant with two characteristics: grilled fish and people I don’t know who won’t talk to me about things I am fully aware of because they’re in all the newspapers and our opinions on them are formed by all the same magazines.

He is, as he admits, a dissatisfied man. “I, too, am oppressed by what I don’t do. But I don’t do it.”

As disturbingly thought-provoking as I found both Zama and The Silentiary, I found The Suicides to be even more disturbing. I don’t mean that as a negative criticism. Our narrator’s head is not a pleasant place to be most of the time, but I also think Di Benedetto explores this challenging terrain well.